Sunday, August 31, 2014

How many countries in the world respect the rights of the individual, reject authoritarianism, and enjoy a civil society?

To be fair, that's a trick question. No country does, though a few come close. Perhaps Canada, Israel, and the U.S. for starters (though in the latter case, said attributes appear to be eroding on a daily basis).

So why would any rational American support an elite group of 100+ barbaric, tyrannical regimes? That's a rhetorical question, because we already do -- not by the consent of the governed, mind you -- and it's called "The United Nations" (or "U.N."). And the UN, by dint of numbers, supports Islamists, terrorists and other anti-civilization throwbacks.

Did you know the United Nations runs a car rental office just for bloodthirsty terrorist pig-dogs?

The beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq was much more than an altogether gruesome and tragic affair: rather, it was a very sophisticated and professional film production deliberately punctuated with powerful symbols. Foley was dressed in an orange jumpsuit reminiscent of the Muslim prisoners held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay. He made his confession forcefully, as if well rehearsed. His executioner, masked and clad in black, made an equally long statement in a calm, British accent, again, as if rehearsed. It was as if the killing was secondary to the message being sent.

The killing, in other words, became merely the requirement to send the message. As experts have told me, there are more painful ways to dispatch someone if you really hate the victim and want him to suffer. You can burn him alive. You can torture him. But beheading, on the other hand, causes the victim to lose consciousness within seconds once a major artery is cut in the neck, experts say. Beheading, though, is the best method for the sake of a visually dramatic video, because you can show the severed head atop the chest at the conclusion. Using a short knife, as in this case, rather than a sword, also makes the event both more chilling and intimate. Truly, I do not mean to be cruel, indifferent, or vulgar. I am only saying that without the possibility of videotaping the event, there would be no motive in the first place to execute someone in such a manner.

In producing a docu-drama in its own twisted way, the Islamic State was sending the following messages:

Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation's largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.

Besides requiring billions in debt forgiveness payments to delinquent borrowers in Cleveland, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago and other Democrat strongholds — and up to $500 million to cover personal taxes owed on those checks — the deal requires BofA to make billions in new loans, while also building affordable low-income rental housing in those areas.

If there are leftover funds in four years, the settlement stipulates the money will go to Interest on Lawyers' Trust Account (IOLTA), which provides legal aid for the poor and supports left-wing causes, and NeighborWorks of America, which provides affordable housing and funds a national network of left-wing community organizers operating in the mold of Acorn.

In fact, in 2008 and 2009, NeighborWorks awarded a whopping $25 million to Acorn Housing.

In 2011 alone, NeighborWorks shelled out $35 million in "affordable housing grants" to 115 such groups, according to its website. Recipients included the radical Affordable Housing Alliance, which pressures banks to make high-risk loans in low-income neighborhoods and which happens to be the former employer of HUD's chief "fair housing" enforcer.

BofA gets extra credit if it makes at least $100 million in direct donations to IOLTA and housing activist groups approved by HUD.

QOTD: "Here’s what the laptop of doom suggests: “Use small grenades with the virus, and throw them in closed areas like metros, soccer stadiums, or entertainment centers. Best to do it next to the air-conditioning. It also can be used during suicide operations.”

The longer ISIS is allowed to exist — and 110 pinprick airstrikes is not degrading their capability — the more time they will have to develop their schemes and plans. Time is not on our side, but it seems that Obama believes he can just dither all the day long. Or perhaps, Obama doesn’t really want to deter ISIS — and certainly not attack them. You have to ask, if Obama has been receiving his daily national security briefs, why would he allow this threat to develop and metastasize into what it is today? Or maybe he does not take any security briefs at all? How could any American president allow such a direct threat to exist and publicly admit he has no plan?

Well, Mr. President Barack Hussein Obama, ISIS has a plan and their plan is not based upon what they will not do, or aren’t willing to do. Obama is conveying the message that he wants to avoid engaging and fighting ISIS. ISIS is conveying the message that they will kill anything and anyone who stands in their way — the way of restoring Islamic dominance.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.

An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.

But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.

He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

Good news for those of you who own a Tesla Model S—it's a car that's sharing top honors on the current list of "least stolen" vehicles within the United States...

...Tesla's Model S currently enjoys an extraordinarily low vehicles-made-to-vehicles-stolen-ratio. For every 1,000 vehicles shipped out of the Tesla factories, an average of 0.15 are stolen. Or, to flip the equation around a bit, one out of every 6,666 Tesla Model S cars are swiped...

...And as for why nobody appears to be running away with Model S in mass quantities, there are a few possible explanations. First off, there simply aren't that many Model S vehicles on the roads compared to the mass-produced, gas-guzzling cars of the company's competitors—more cars, more potential for theft.

There's also the fact that thieves aren't likely to get much resale value when they run away with a Model S car.

That and the fact that the Tesla has been known to occasionally turn into a fireball when it encounters road debris, perhaps.

An Ohio school was placed on lockdown Wednesday after a man with a “heavy accent” phoned the school and threatened to murder children with an AK-47 due to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to local police.

All schools in Pickerington, Ohio, were placed on lockdown after an unknown man made a threatening call to the Pickerington North High School, Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalen confirmed ... The man, who claimed to have an AK-47, said he planned to launch an attack on the school and kill students over his apparent anger at the Middle East conflict, Phalen said.

“The school received a call [at around 11:15 a.m.] from a male with a heavy accent and he indicated that he was going to attack Pickerington North due to attacks on Israel and was going to kill the kids and that he had an AK-47 gun,” Phalen recounted... “He identified himself as ‘Mohammed Shehad,’” or something similar to that, and claimed to live in the area, Phalen said, explaining that those who fielded the call were unsure precisely what last name the man provided.

A man who had an ISIS flag waving from his vehicle is facing several charges after he threatened police with a bomb Wednesday morning when he was pulled over on the Southwest Side... Emad Karakrah, 49, was charged with felony counts of disorderly conduct and aggravated fleeing; and a misdemeanor count of driving on a never-issued license, according to Chicago Police. He was also issued three traffic citations.

Someone called police after seeing a “suspicious person” driving a silver Pontiac southbound in the 7700 block of South Kedzie at 9:18 a.m. with an ISIS flag waving out the window, according to a police report.

Officers attempted to pull over the vehicle, but the driver took off, according to the report. The officers called for assistance, and another officer pulled the vehicle over after it went through several red lights.

The man told police during his arrest that there was a bomb in the car and he would detonate it if they searched the vehicle, according to the report... A bomb squad, the FBI and Homeland Security responded to the scene and searched the vehicle, but no bomb was found, authorities said.

In March, Chris Sourovelis’ son was caught selling $40 of heroin to an undercover police officer.

Officers from the Philadelphia Police Department responded by raiding the Sourovelis’ north Philadelphia home, with guns drawn — one of them pointed at the head of the family dog — and found small amounts of the drug in the 22-year old’s bedroom. Chris and his wife, Amy, knew nothing of their son’s drug habit and it was the first time he had been busted for possessing narcotics.

A few weeks later, the cops were back to tell the Sourovelis family they had to gather their things and leave the property. The home was being confiscated under civil forfeiture rules, leaving the family homeless and forced to sleep on a neighbor’s couch.

To get their home back, Chris and Amy Sourovelis had to agree that their son would no longer live with them. Even though they agreed, the family could still lose their home permanently as the case winds through the city’s legal system.

“I did not do anything wrong, yet Philadelphia is trying to take my house,” said Chris Sourovelis, in a statement released by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm involved in the case. “If this can happen to me and my family, it can happen to anybody.”

And it does, more often than might be expected.

From 2002 through 2012, law enforcement in Philadelphia seized more than 1,000 homes, 3,200 vehicles and $44 million in cash, according to data obtained by the Institute for Justice through an open records request.

Those assets provided more than $64 million in revenue to the Philadelphia DA’s office, because Pennsylvania law allows local law enforcement to keep the proceeds from forfeited property after it is seized and resold.

Property can be seized by police without requiring a conviction — or even a criminal charge, in some cases — and the proceeds have padded the Philadelphia District Attorney’s bottom line by 20 percent during the past decade.

Attorneys working on the lawsuit say the city has set up a “forfeiture machine” to take advantage of the perverse incentives created by the law.

QOTD: "I want the American people to understand something, Sean. The commander in chief, and we only have one, is the president of the United States and his name is Barack Obama. And these cockroaches organized, funded themselves, built a forceful military, started conquering geographic areas all around the world under his nose. He ignored it. He did nothing about it. He didn't talk to the American people about it. As a matter of fact, he downplayed it. This is one of the worst military national security screw ups in modern American history. And he's still screwing up. Has he rallied the American people? Has he spoken to congress? Has he asked for a declaration of war or at least a joint resolution to fund an aggressive offensive attack against these cockroaches? No, he hasn't. We're dealing with a very peculiar, petulant man who operates with a few advisors around him. A man who really needs as much counciling and expertise he can get given his thin resume and experience record." --Mark Levin

Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle born improvised explosive devices (VBIED). High-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources have confirmed to Judicial Watch that a warning bulletin for an imminent terrorist attack on the border has been issued. Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies have all been placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning this imminent terrorist threat.

Specifically, Judicial Watch sources reveal that the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is confirmed to now be operating in Juarez, a famously crime-infested narcotics hotbed situated across from El Paso, Texas. Violent crimes are so rampant in Juarez that the U.S. State Department has issued a number of travel warnings for anyone planning to go there. The last one was issued just a few days ago.

Intelligence officials have picked up radio talk and chatter indicating that the terrorist groups are going to “carry out an attack on the border,” according to one JW source. “It’s coming very soon,” according to this high-level source, who clearly identified the groups planning the plots as “ISIS and Al Qaeda.” An attack is so imminent that the commanding general at Ft. Bliss, the U.S. Army post in El Paso, is being briefed, another source confirms. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to multiple inquiries from Judicial Watch, both telephonic and in writing, about this information.

QOTD: "To maintain their personal sense of superiority, progressives [like Jon Stewart] need to sit in the seat of the scoffer. They used to spend their time mocking those who dared question President Obama as self-evident fools and racists.

Now that Obama’s failure is obvious, they’ve had to move on to other targets. Defending his disastrous record would make his fans look like the unsophisticated rubes, and they can’t have that. Instead, they focus on a stumbling Fox News host, an errant red-state legislator, or any citizen whose comments can be edited to inject the left with their daily dose of smug." --Jon Gabriel

It’s that time of year again – when the little juvenile delinquents, future prison inmates, and functionally illiterate junior members of the free s*** army pick up their “free” backpacks and “free” school supplies they will never use and shuffle off to the decaying prison like schools in the City of Philadelphia to eat “free” breakfasts and “free” lunches, while being taught government sanctioned pablum by overpaid mediocre union teachers.

It’s a repeat of every year for the Phila school district. As the school year approaches they are shocked to report a massive deficit and beg the State of PA for more funding. The $12,000 per child simply isn’t enough, even though Parochial schools provide ten times the education for $9,000 per child. The district has a slight $80 million deficit this year. Last year they had a $100 million deficit and the mayor proposed a soda tax to fill the gap. It was defeated, so they raised property taxes instead. Mayor Nutter’s name is fitting. He is just another in a long line of Democratic mayors who have ruled Philadelphia since the 1950′s and whose policies of welfare handouts for their voting base paid for by taxing the producers, has resulted in a population decline from 2.1 million in 1950 to 1.5 million today. Doug Casey captures the essence of Philly with this definition:

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy): a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

The liberal solution to an ever decreasing tax base and an ever growing level of benefits for the free s*** army and government union drones, is to increase taxes on the few remaining producers. They then flee the city, leaving fewer producers to tax. Rinse and repeat. Your neighborhoods then look like this.

On Monday evening, California Governor Jerry Brown said all Mexicans, including illegal immigrants, are welcome in California.

According to the Los Angeles Times, while introducing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who said America is "the other Mexico," Brown "spoke about the interwoven histories of Mexico and California." He "nodded to the immigrants in the room, saying it didn't matter if they had permission to be in the United States."

"You're all welcome in California," Brown reportedly said.

Brown has made California a sanctuary state by signing the Trust Act and giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. He has also expanded financial aid to illegal immigrants by signing the California DREAM Act. Peña Nieto reportedly "thanked state officials for embracing foreigners, citing measures that extend state benefits to immigrants."

Even during the border crisis, Brown reportedly vowed "to find ways to shorten long waits at the Tijuana-San Diego international border crossing," saying, "If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a man from Mexico to California in 20 minutes."

In 2012, 28% of Californians were born outside the United States, according to The New York Times. Hispanic voters reportedly "made up 19.2% of California voters" in 2010. And according to Pew Research, Latinos make up nearly 40% of the state's population and have made California "only the second state, behind New Mexico, where whites are not the majority and Latinos are the plurality."

BISMARCK, N.D. — A map developed by the EPA and released to a U.S. House committee investigating controversial proposed water regulations should have citizens concerned, says U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer.

A farm group in North Dakota is calling the maps a “gall darn can of worms.”

“It is certainly alarming the EPA would develop these maps in secret and only release them after being confronted by members of Congress,” Cramer, a Republican, said in a news release accompanying his office’s release of the maps. “The EPA has been hiding information which could upset the public and jeopardize its massive power grab of unprecedented authority over private and public water.”

The maps were released by the EPA to the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, on which Cramer serves. One map shows perennial bodies of water in blue and intermittent bodies of water in yellow. A second regional map including North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah uses blue to show each state’s “wetlands inventory.”

On that map, nearly the entire state of North Dakota is in blue.

Critics of the proposed rule have suggested the EPA intends to use it to expand regulation far beyond permanent bodies of water to lands that hold water only some of the time.

“It doesn’t take much of a leap to conclude these highly detailed maps developed with taxpayer funds are for the purpose of enforcing this rule,” Cramer said.

QOTD: "No government intrusion in our lives is more direct, personal and threatening than Obamacare’s intrusion in the care of our own health.

But Obamacare will harm us on a broader scale, as the underlying nature of the health law’s provisions, and the tactics used to implement them, affect all areas of public and business policy.

The suppression of liberty in health care choices will take all privacy down with it. Tight government control of electronic medical records–which used to be private–seems a minor contribution to the destruction of the Fourth Amendment compared to the seizure of everyone’s communications with everybody, without individual court orders based on probable cause.

How can we protest loss of privacy in any communications when we must surrender it for our medical records?" --Richard E. Ralston

China reportedly wants to enter the world of supersonic transport – under the water.

Rather than working up its own successor-to-Concorde project, the South China Morning Postsays scientists at Harbin Institute of Technology's Complex Flow and Heat Transfer Lab are working on developing a technique called supercavitation, first pursued by the Soviet military during the Cold War.

...Supercavitation refers to giving the vessel a bubble to travel in, reducing the drag of water. In the SCMP diagram, the vessel is shown ejecting gas at its nose to maintain the bubble. This demands a high-speed launch to generate the air bubble in the first place, unless there's some way to let a vessel start slow but accelerate to supercavitating speeds.

That's the bit the Chinese boffins reckon they've dealt with: their vessel covers itself with a liquid membrane at launch to deal with water drag at low speed. The membrane will wear away, but that doesn't matter so long as the sub can get to a high enough speed to generate its own air bubble.

The group also says its approach provides a way to steer the vessel: the liquid membrane can manage drag on one side or the other to change directions. “By combining liquid-membrane technology with supercavitation, we can significantly reduce the launch challenges and make cruising control easier,” says Harbin professor Li Fengchen in the story.

If a vessel could exceed the speed of sound underwater – around 5,800 km/h, which is no mean feat to start with – it would travel from Shanghai to San Francisco in around 100 minutes.

I'm no physicist, but displacing that amount of water for that length of time would seem to be a tad beyond man's reach at the moment.

As Britain collapses into inevitable chaos, civil war, and jihad in the streets, Blair, Cameron, May and the rest, and all the dreary Sarah Browns (one of the proprietors of the Leftist dhimmi hate site Harry’s Place) among their dreary, dreary supporters, can congratulate themselves that as they bring down a once-great civilization upon their own heads, at least no one will think that they were “racist.”

America appears headed down the same dismal road. In the aftermath of the Fort Hood mass murders in 2009, with 14 dead (including an unborn child) and many more wounded, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey reminded us that, "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but it would be an even greater tragedy, if our diversity becomes a casualty here."

The Conservative Treehouse has done yeoman's work exposing the Obama administration's many machinations over the manufactured border crisis. In a report published at Accuracy in Media earlier this month, I described how the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program of the Department of Health and Human Services has exploded, spending almost $700 million so far this year, more than double that of 2013. Much of the information described in that report was initially dug up by the Treehouse.

As we described in the report, many of these "children" were not in fact children, but young men and women, many of whom were gang members or being actively recruited by gangs. Largely unreported were the 200,000 plus illegal alien families accompanying these youths. The Treehouse has now uncovered evidence of deliberate manipulation of the UAC numbers conducted by the Obama administration.

The U.S. Border Patrol has reported apprehension of 57,525 UACs in 2014, almost double the 2013 number. However another agency, the Executive Office for Immigration Review is tasked with actually confirming these numbers. It counts a total of 20,814, only slightly more than 2013, (20,778), and once again, most of these are not the young children the media has been showing heart-rending photos of. The fact is that there is no crisis of young, unaccompanied children flooding the border. There are entire families flooding the border.

QOTD: "Imagine that President Obama, immediately after his re-election, assembled a sort of reverse bucket list--an enumeration of the things he least wanted to do in his second term. What's on the list? By our reckoning the top two entries are obvious: 1. Sign legislation repealing ObamaCare. 2. Go to war in Iraq.

Now imagine that Lois Lerner had never been born and Obama narrowly lost in 2012. Fast-forward to the summer of 2014, and President Romney is facing the ISIS crisis. Romney announces U.S. air strikes in Iraq and demands that other countries cooperate: "From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread."

Is there any doubt this would be contentious as hell? Democrats would denounce Romney as a war monger and accuse him of squandering one of Obama's "great achievements," the successful withdrawal from Iraq, by allowing the situation there to deteriorate so as to provide a pretext for military intervention. War protesters would fill the streets of American and foreign cities. Prominent leftists would denounce Romney--who avoided the Vietnam-era draft thanks to student and ministerial deferments--as a "chicken hawk." Opposition to the new Iraq war would mobilize the left, creating the prospect of a Democratic wave in November." --James Taranto

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Ed Kilgore -- if that is his real name -- is allegedly a journalist working at the execrable Washington Monthly. His claim to fame is a startling resemblance to Gollum, though without that creature's smooth complexion and strong chin.

Genuine reporter Warner Todd Huston relays news that Kilgore has a solution to the ongoing ratings disaster at NBC's Meet the Hindenburg Press. Kilgore's brainstorm involves -- wait for it -- fewer Republican voices and even more radical Lefists. Genius!

We already know that the fascist, authoritarian left wants to ban anyone and anything they don’t agree with. But usually they have the good sense not to say so out loud for fear that people will realize they are fascist authoritarians. But one “journalist” finally admitted the truth.

Left-winger Ed Kilgore, who blogs for Washington Monthly magazine, made to comment on the new ideas that NBC has for revamping Meet The Press when Chuck Todd takes over the venerable Sunday political show (Todd himself is an old Democrat operative, by the way).

In his August 25 post entitled, “Who Should Be Banned as Panelists For the New ‘Meet?’,” Kilgore notes that NBC president Deborah Turness is saying that she wants to have a panel of journalists question each guest as a sort of “coffeehouse conversation.”
Turness imagines that this will bring “more edge” to the long running Sunday political show. Kilgore thinks this is a terrible idea. Why? Because *gasp* that panel might have conservatives on it.

So, Kilgore has a solution for this conservative “problem.” He thinks NBC should ban all conservatives as panelists...

If Turness is serious about this, we need to organize a grassroots campaign to ask that certain journalists be permanently banned from the panel of Meet The Press, or we’ll boycott the damn thing ab initio. I’d start with Peggy Noonan, Bill Kristol, David Gergen, David Brooks and George Will. Even at their best, they’ve all gotten more airtime than their shaky talents merit. But I’m sure you have dozens more who deserve the Meet Ban. Fire away in the comment thread.

Now that is how we know all liberals think. They don’t want the free and open exchange of political ideas that the founders dreamed of when they crafted the Bill Of Rights. No, all liberals are fascists at heart and given the power they would ban all opposing views.

Kilgore's advocacy for virtual book burnings is surprising only because it pulls back the curtain on the totalitarian mindset endemic to the modern Democrat Party.

Kilgore would have been at home in the old Soviet Union organizing pogroms or as a wannabe-Sturmbannführer harrassing Jews and other political undesirables in the street.